4 Culture

In this K’ang-hsi period culture began to flourish again.  The emperor had attracted the gentry, and so the intelligentsia, to his court because his uneducated Manchus could not alone have administered the enormous empire; and he showed great interest in Chinese culture, himself delved deeply into it, and had many works compiled, especially works of an encyclopaedic character.  The encyclopaedias enabled information to be rapidly gained on all sorts of subjects, and thus were just what an interested ruler needed, especially when, as a foreigner, he was not in a position to gain really thorough instruction in things Chinese.  The Chinese encyclopaedias of the seventeenth and especially of the eighteenth century were thus the outcome of the initiative of the Manchurian emperor, and were compiled for his information; they were not due, like the French encyclopaedias of the eighteenth century, to a movement for the spread of knowledge among the people.  For this latter purpose the gigantic encyclopaedias of the Manchus, each of which fills several bookcases, were much too expensive and were printed in much too limited editions.  The compilations began with the great geographical encyclopaedia of Ku Yen-wu (1613-1682), and attained their climax in the gigantic eighteenth-century encyclopaedia T’u-shu chi-ch’eng, scientifically impeccable in the accuracy of its references to sources.  Here were already the beginnings of the “Archaeological School”, built up in the course of the eighteenth century.  This school was usually called “Han school” because the adherents went back to the commentaries of the classical texts written in Han time and discarded the orthodox explanations of Chu Hsi’s school of Sung time.  Later, its most prominent leader was Tai Chen (1723-1777).  Tai was greatly interested in technology and science; he can be regarded as the first philosopher who exhibited an empirical, scientific way of thinking.  Late nineteenth and early twentieth century Chinese scholarship is greatly obliged to him.

The most famous literary works of the Manchu epoch belong once more to the field which Chinese do not regard as that of true literature—­the novel, the short story, and the drama.  Poetry did exist, but it kept to the old paths and had few fresh ideas.  All the various forms of the Sung period were made use of.  The essayists, too, offered nothing new, though their number was legion.  One of the best known is Yuean Mei (1716-1797), who was also the author of the collection of short stories Tse-pu-yue ("The Master did not tell"), which is regarded very highly by the Chinese.  The volume of short stories entitled Liao-chai chich-i, by P’u Sung-lin (1640-1715?), is world-famous and has been translated into every civilized language.  Both collections are distinguished by their simple but elegant style.  The short story was popular among the greater gentry; it abandoned the popular style it had had in the Ming epoch, and adopted the polished language of scholars.